Clean up after the holidays: page speed and more

Christmas is gone and online marketing is getting back to normal. Time to start thinking about some maintenance issues. This is the time to:

Check your stats

Look at page speed

Check your tags

Delete outdated info and offers

Let’s look at each of those in more detail.

Check your stats

On squidoo your stats are only visible for three months. So this is the time to note whether your top traffic Christmas lenses were found for any unexpected words and phrases. Are they topics to make a lens about? If so, make that lens. Or at the least use that phrase on any other lens it may fit on.

Check what you sold. Same story: are there potential lens ideas there? It’s not too early to make a lens for next Christmas.

The same goes of course for any other online projects you have. The combined statistics are probably even more helpful in determining further chances in getting traffic or sales.

Page speed

Google has announced that starting somewhere in 2010 they will be starting to take the loading time of pages and sites into account in the serps. In other words: slow sites will find it harder to rank and fast sites easier than before. I’ve already filed a feature request with squidoo about this, because the site has some serious speed issues. These are partly related to the increased traffic the site has seen recently, but they’re also in the code and fixable.

On any online project the images are under your own command. And they take up a lot of server space. It turns out that generally one can decrease their file size by about 40% without losing any image quality. Use punypng to decrease file size. Start with your lensmaster photo and work your way down from there.

While you’re at it: make sure any images you upload anew do have keywords (2 or 3) in the file name. As in keyword1-keyword2.jpg

I know – you’ve heard me talk about tags before. But after Christmas very different lenses become popular than before. Your top lenses will likely go down and some mid range lenses will go up. For some tags this makes no difference. After all: all Christmas lenses are going down in lensrank so the ‘christmas’ tag page is not likely to change much. But even for more general tags such as ‘shopping’ and ‘holidays’ there is likely a shake up. So it’s a good idea to check the tags for each of your lenses that changes a tier. Is your lens linking to tag pages it is not featured on?

See this as a sort of early spring cleaning.

While you’re at it: check your hubs on hubpages too. The tag system there is slightly different from squidoo. Still doesn’t usually make sense to use a tag that thousands of other people are using on an obscure hub. Combine one word tags to two word tags to keep the same keywords in there and check whether your hub is listed on the first page of the ‘hot’ or ‘best’ hubs for that topic. Perhaps you’re even listed as a top hubber for a tag that you have no hub ranking highly for… Keep tags like that. Get rid of tags only that one lens or at the opposite end of the spectrum hundreds or even thousands of hubs using.

Delete outdated info and offers

If you’ve used any affiliate programs to sell during the Christmas season, you’ve likely put up information about holiday deals too. Delete those. Otherwise: don’t change too much about your successful lenses. You will want to recreate that success next year.

This is also a good time to check all outgoing links. I just checked the links in a few plexos and up to half now returned 404s.